British Columbia’s public sector wages have skyrocketed in the past two years, even as most people in the province are still reeling from the effects of the recession, which hit the western province later than the rest of Canada. Like a tsunami that swept from east to west, British Columbia remained relatively insulated from the downturn well after it had swamped the east.

Employment in BC continued to grow as the Winter Olympic Games approached, peaking in late 2008 before dropping off like a waterfall. While the unemployment rate in the rest of Canada has subsided, the latest from statistics Canada show May passed with the unemployment rate fixed at 8.1%. Statistics Canada shows that median income in the province has fallen in the past 25 years.

Wages for full time workers in BC fell 11.3% from 1980 to 2005 [in 2005 constant dollars and adjusted for inflation], and perhaps more significantly, over the five-year period between 2000 and 2005, B.C. and Quebec were the only two provinces to record a decline. Four of those years coincide with the start of the BC Liberal Party’s 9-year-grip on power.

But there is some good news, particularly if you’re a public servant and a member of the “sunshine list.”

Former Ontario Premier Mike Harris created the “sunshine list” in 1996 to illustrate how the bloated bureaucracy had given rise to a large corps of public servants earning more than $100,000 a year. And thanks to the nurturing bosom of mother government in this province, the number of BC public servants earning that amount or more jumped by a staggering 22% in just the past two years, according to a

All told, more than 2,000 public-sector workers found their way into the good life between 2007 and 2009, the time period during which most companies in the private sector were battening down the hatches, freezing salaries and buying lots of pink paper to deliver to workers on Fridays.

What’s interesting about this revelation is that these public sector workers have the distinction of earning four times more than the median individual income in BC, good for a lifestyle in the 96th percentile of adults in the whole province.

But wait. There’s more.

Though it may be a cliché, the rich keep getting richer as the poor get poorer, and this is especially true as one navigates through the figures. Those civil servants earning at least $150,000 increased by 26%in the past two years, while the ones at the highest level — above $200,000 — enjoyed salary boosts of 20%.

Gordon Campbell’s government announced a pay raise in 2008, even as it introduced the carbon tax on British Columbians, providing immense pay increases to senior bureaucrats, including a 21% raise to assistant deputy ministers. The biggest increase was for the position of deputy minister to the premier, which rose as much as 43% to $348,600. The deputy minister at the time, Jessica McDonald, declined to accept an increase.

Ms. McDonald’s replacement, Allan Seckel, defends the increases to this day, citing the need to compete with the private sector and other provinces.

“Yeah, there might be more of us over $100,000 than there were a year ago,” he told the

Sun

. “But those people could make more in the private sector than they’re making in the public sector.”

Which begs the question: so why not let them work in the private sector? Would nobody apply for positions in government if we didn’t pay them four times the median income in the province?

These massive pay increases occurred during a recession, and at a time the government is running a rather impressive deficit. Some people in the province have had to take pay cuts of up to 25% to return to work, even as British Columbia’s sunshine list bloats ever outwards.

Compound all of this with the fact the B.C. government is about to drop a $2 billion “tax shift” from corporate British Columbia to consumers, and you get the sense that the HST straw might not survive the taxpayer camel’s back.

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